GESTALT RECONSIDERED Titles from Gicpress ORGA:'-IIZATIONAL CONSULTING: a GFSTALT APPROACH Edwin C

GESTALT RECONSIDERED Titles From GICPress ORGA:'-IIZATIONAL CONSULTING: A GFSTALT APPROACH Edwin C. Nevts GFSTALT RECONSIDERED: A NEW APPROACH TO CONTAcr AND RFSISTANCE Cordon Wheeler THE NEUROTIC BEHAVIOR OF ORGANIZATIONS Uri Merry and George /. Brown GFSTALT THERAPY: PERSPECTIVFS AND APPLICATIONS Edwin C. Nevis THE COLLECTIVE SILENCE: GERMAN IDENTITY AND THE LEGACY OF SHAME Barbara Heimannsberg and Christopher J. Schmidt COMMUNITY AND CONFLUENCE: UNDOING THE CLINCH OF OPPRESSION Philip Licluenberg BECOMING A STEPF AMIL Y Patricia Papemow ON INTIMATE GROUND: A GFSTALT APPROACH TO WORKING WITH COUPLFS Cordon Wheeler and Stephanie Backman BODY PROCFSS: WORKING WITH THE BODY IN PSYCHOTHERAPY James I. Kepner HERE, NOW, NEXT: PAUL GOODMAN AND THE ORIGINS OF GFSTALT THERAPY Taylor Stoehr CRAZY HOPE & FINITE EXPERIENCE Paul Goodman and Taylor Stoehr IN SEARCH OF GOOD FORM: GFST ALT THERAPY WITH COUPLFS AND FAMILIFS Joseph C. Zinker THE VOICE OF SHAME: SILENCE AND CONNECTION IN PSYCHOTHERAPY Robert G. Lee and Gordon Wheeler HEALING TASKS: PSYCHOTHERAPY WITH ADULT SURIVIVORS OF CHILDHOOD ABUSE Jame, I. Kepner ADOL£SCENCE: PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE EMERGENT SELF Mark McConville GEIlING BEYOND SOBRIETY: CLINICAL APPROACHFS TO LONG- TERMJlECOVERY Michael Craig Clemmens INTENTIONAL REVOLUTIONS: A SEVEN- POINT STRATEGY FOR TRANSFORMING ORGANIZATIONS Edwin C. Nevis, Joan Lancourt and Helen G. Vassallo IN SEARCH OF SELF: BEYOND INDIVIDUALISM IN WORKING WITH PEOPLE Cordon Wheeler THE HEART OF DEVELOPMENT: GFSTALT APPROACHFS TO WORKING WITH CillLDREN. AOOLfSCENTS. AND THEIR WORLDS ( 2 Volumes) Mark McConville and Gordon Wheeler BACK TO THE BEANSTALK: ENCHANTMENT & REALITY FOR COUPLFS Judith R. Brown THE DREAMER AND THE DREAM: ESSAYS AND REFLECTIONS ON GFSTALT THERAPY Raineue Eden Fantz and Arthur Roberts GFSTALT THERAPY-A NEW PARADIGM: FSSA YS IN GFSTALT THEORY AND MErHOD Sylvia Flemming Crocker THE lJr'.'FOLDING SELF Jean-Marie Rabine GESTALT RECONSIDERED

A New Approach to Contact and Resistance

GORDON WHEELER, Ph. D.

Distributed by The Analytic Press, Inc. , Hillsdale, NJ.

Library of Congress Card No. 90· 32243 ISBN O· 88163· 248· 1 For Sonia and Edwin Nevis inspired and inspiring mentors, colleagues, friends Acknowledgements for the Second Edition

The introduction to the first edition of this book acknowledges stimulation and contributions from a small number of mentors and colleagues-<>f whom I am sad to say a number have since died. Of these I particularly miss my friends and teachers Rennie Fantz, Walter Grossman, and Murray Horwitz. By contrast, my life and work over the last seven years have been enormously enriched by the presence, creativity, support and criticism of a great number of new conversational partners in the Gestalt world, including Penny Backman, Talia bar-Levine Joseph, Jacques Beugre, Michael Borack, Michael Clemmens, Nicole de Schrevel, Eric Erickson, Mariah Fenton-Gladdis, Jay Ferraro, Iris Fodor, Isabel Fredericson, Cynthia and Leo Oudejans Harris, Lynne Jacobs, Dan Jones, Jim Kepner, Mary Ann Kraus, Joel Lamer, Bob Lee, Maryse Mathys, Mark McConville, Joe Melnick, Violet Oaklander, Malcolm Parlett, Arch Roberts, Jean-Marie Robine, Paul Shane, Allan Singer, Taylor Stoehr, and Deborah Ullman. Most of all I want to acknowledge the generous support and gracious community and personal leadership of Edwin C. and Sonia March Nevis, who separately and collectively have taken leading roles in founding the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland itself, the GIC Center for the Study of Intimate Systems, GICPress, GISC and the annual GISC Gestalt Writers' Conference (now in its tenth anniversary year), the Gestalt Review, and not least, the New England Gestalt Study Group. Sonia and Edwin have mentored and stimulated several generations of Gestalt students, teachers, and practitioners now around the globe, and certainly my own work could not be what it has been and is, without their inspiring support and challenge ( in particular, practically everything I have written in the field traces back in one way or another to the stimulation of an argument or discussion over terms and concepts with Sonia) . This new edition of Gestalt Reconsidered is gratefully dedicated to Edwin and Sonia, in fond recognition of their many direct and indirect contributions to my work, my life, and my community. As I wrote in the acknowledgements to In Search of Self, each of them embodies and exemplifies that rarest of all hallmarks of mature generattvlty: the gift for nurturing many children, and then setting them free. Finally, this new edition is particularly graced by the addition of a Preface and an Epilogue, contributed respectively by two gifted and stimulating colleagues in the Gestalt world. Malcolm Parlett is well-known as one of the most distinguished teachers, writers and editors of my own generation in the Gestalt therapy model• roughly the third generation, if we start counting with Goodman and Perls as the first, and reckon their own gifted students, many of whom were my teachers, as the second. It is an honor to have his perspective here. The Epilogue, by Arthur Roberts, represents a voice from the next, or fourth generation, with considerable emphasis on where this book falls short by raising issues it does not fully answer, as well as on new potentials and pathways for development of the model in a number of creative new directions. It is a great pleasure to introduce this new voice from a new generation to the Gestalt world, and particularly gratifying to think that this book, through its limitations as well as any virtues, may have played some part in opening up or clearing the way for some of the new directions Roberts outlines so fruitfully here. CONTENTS

FOREWORD by Malcolm Parlett v INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION v INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION 1 1: THE BACKGROUND IN GESTALT 12 PSYCHOLOGY Gestalt and the Associationist Model 12 The Gestalt School-Early Work 17 Elaboration ofthe Wertheimer Model 23 The Lewinian Model 27 Goldstein's Hierarchical Model 32 Gestalt Personality Theory 34 A Gestalt Model ofChange 35 2: THE EARLY WORK OF PERLS 42 3: GESTALT THERAPY: THE GOODMANI 58 PERLSMODEL 4: THE WORK OF THE CLEVELAND 84 SCHOOL The Experience Cycle 85 The Gestalt Experiment 93 The Interpersonal Perspective 99 Group Dynamics 102 Work with Systems 104 The Elaboration of the Perlsian Model 107 ofthe Resistances 5: THE RESISTANCES RECONSIDERED 110 6: THE STRUCTURE OF GROUND: 133 THE TWO CLINICAL CASES The Case ofJosh, or Scylla and Charybdis 133 The Case ofLinda, or Civil Wars 148 7: THE STRUCTURE OF GROUND 156 CONTINUED: TWO SYSTEMS CASES The Unresistant System 156 A Final Case: "Gestalt" Reconsidered 169 CONCLUSION 178 EPILOGUE by Arthur Roberts 181 REFERENCES INDEX F o R E w o R D

THE PUBLICATION of Gestalt Reconsidered in 1991 was an event that will not escape the attention of future Gestalt historians. Among the welcome flow of new Gestalt writing in the 1990s, there was no other Gestalt book written in English of its kind. Something of a furor followed its publication. Detractors and enthusiasts appeared, veiled insults were exchanged, 'positions' taken up. It had the flavor of one of those rows which can rock an academic discipline, setting factions at each other's throats and producing a buzz even at the sleepiest of college high tables. The book led to no full fledged war, and of course (and alas) the academic world of Gestalt therapy is still a small one, so that it all proceeded on a tiny scale. Yet there were signs of fierce disagreement-predictable praise from certain quarters, and equally predictable disdain from others. I remember my first rapid reading of the book and the excitement which surged through me. This did not arise, I have to admit, because of Wheeler's ideas in themselves-all of which needed a lot more scrutiny and consideration on a second and slower read through-but because of the sheer scale of his revlsloning. Stimulating theoretical debate was bound to follow and a lor of feathers likely to fly. A certain kind of coziness which had settled over part of our collective thinking was being unsettled. I will not go down the various avenues of debate within the Gestalt community which followed. Two book reviews, one by Peter Philippson, British Gestalt Journal, Vol. 1, No.2, 1991, and another by Gary Yontef, The Gestalt Journal, Vol. XV, No.1, 1992, with responses by Gordon Wheeler in the following

v Foreword « issues of each of these journals, are well worth reading. They display the disagreements and intensity of convictions on both sides. My purpose here is not to enter the lists but to celebrate the book's reappearance. I do not have to agree with everything Wheeler writes here. Some of it resonates very deeply while other parts do not. But I am heartily glad he wrote this book; I regard it as a notable addition to the Gestalt literature and a provocative stimulant to our collective intellectual life as a discipline of maturity. Specifically, I am pleased that he has returned to the beginnings of Gestalt therapy and to the roots of the tree which run deeply into Gestalt psychology and its history. This has never been done better. He has rightfully drawn Lewin and Goldstein from the relative shadows into the limelight. Within the scope of a single book, he has addressed both clinical and non-clinical applications of Gestalt thought (and the joining of these streams, I believe, is both necessary and inevitable as we head into the twenty-first century). He has expressed in a robust way values and practical priorities which should command-and largely do now• general assent across the community of Gestalt practitioners, notably in his critique of episodic and facile exchanges which ignore the wider field. He has put himself on the line by including several case studies-a genre notably easy for critics who want to take pot• shots, and one which has remained relatively undeveloped. Moreover, Wheeler brings to his discussion here a confident, and opinionated, scholar's vision, vigorously written and intelligently put, which raises the standards for other writers-no bad thing. Perhaps the most daring aspect of his achievement has been to go to the fount of original Gestalt writing, to the great source book, and to question a number of its most central ideas. Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Persanality, by F. S. Peds, R. Hefferline, & P. Goodman was first published in 1951 (now re-published by The Gestalt Journal Press in a revised form with a new introduction). As a work-sometimes referred to as Gestalt's 'bible' -it has attracted every reaction from immense respect to scornful disregard. For some it is a brUliantly evocative, poetic, and satisfying book, worthy of long and detaUed study. For others it is a frustrating book-desperately unedited, with a scarcity of concrete examples, mystifying and often contradictory. But there is no question of its centrality and its historical import. So for Gordon Wheeler to penetrate to the center of this citadel, as it were, upturning and examining the traditional

ii Foreword

'resistances to contact' (inttojection, retroflection etc.) along the way, and even taking on the central concept of figure/ ground itself, is the stuff of a daring one-man raid. What he has demonstrated is that nothing is inherently sacrosanct. Nothing is, or should be, taken for granted and beyond criticism. This openness raises for some the specter of the whole of Gestalt therapy theory being fatally undermined or blurred into indistinction. Yet our very philosophy calls for unsettlement, for a culture of questioning, for continual regeneration of our central theoretical beliefs in the light of changing knowledge and societal and human needs. It would be a tragic irony if Gestalt Therapy (the book) were treated more and more reverently as time went by. Anyway, its original vision has by no means been destroyed by Wheeler's book. He raises a number of critical questions, makes many astute points, and returns to perpetually relevant concerns. With this book, Gordon Wheeler has not blurred Gestalt, as some have seemed to imply, but rather has done it a profound service, not least by constructively forcing each of us to consider where we stand regarding certain concepts central to our daily work as Gestaltists. One last point before throwing open the doors of this exciting book for you who are about to enter. At the heart of Gestalt practice is a concern with attending closely to the organization of present experience. We all recognize a basic fact about humans (and families, organizations and systems of all kinds), that we are constantly applying yesterday's solutions to today' s problems. Present contingencies require unique and creative resolutions of the current tensions in the field. Yet overwhelmingly, our experiential field is formed from pre-existing constructs, habitual percepts and patterned residues of unfinished business from the past. The exact process, therefore, of combining' the novel' with 'the familiar' (to speak simplistically), lies at the epicenter of Gestalt interest. And this is exactly the territory which Wheeler is mapping. When he speaks of 'the structured gtound' he is referring to the fact that crucial parts of present experience are based in predictable sequencing, supportive familiarity, necessary recognition of what is 'known already'. We do indeed have a distorted theory if this monumentally obvious feature of the way in which fields are configured has been given insufficient weight, because of our conjoint commitment to immediacy and creativity in the present moment. It is an achievement for any Gestalt book to be reprinted. While Wheeler's ideas have progressed and have become

iii Foreword somewhat differently focused in the past decade, his consistent theme, of how our psychological models are subtly limited by an old heritage of objectivism and authoritarianism, first stated in this book, remains clear and important today. No doubt the book neglects areas of Gestalt work- some of them highly developed even at the time when it first appeared- that should have been included. I am thinking, for instance, of the dialogic work based on Buber and centering around the Los Angeles Gestalt communiry. At the same time it is heartening indeed to have this book available again. I hope it will continue to be widely read. For those who encountered Gestalt therapy twenty or thirty years ago, and thought it had died away, stuck itself in a time warp, or had no theoretical substance, this is a 'welcome back' book. It is an arresting and controversial restatement pitched at a sophisticated level. Gestalt Reconsidered is a major Gestalt work, and a major work in psychotherapy and related fields in general. I commend it to your attention with enthusiasm.

Malcolm Parlett Editor, British Gestalt Journal

iv INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION

IT HAS BEEN a full decade at this writing since I first sat down to try to put some order into the ideas and concerns of this book, which grew out of the world of Gestalt theory and practice at the time-and seven now since its publication in 1991 by Gardner Press of New York, the first commercial publisher in the States to make a commitment to a Gestalt book series. These ten years have been full of incident and upheaval, both within the Gestalt community and in the wider world. In some ways that wider world seems better today than it was ten years ago-in others not. The old dichotomous division of the world into east and west "camps," long out of date and like most extreme polarities serving to obscure many truths and problems on both sides, has been destructured at last, leaving in its place an unstable map of shifting national boundaries in search of a new world order, which is yet to emerge. Meanwhile the world continues to careen ahead, under the uncertain and ecologically disastrous domination of "the West," which more and more means international corporate interests, unimpeded by any constituency or government. Some ancient tribal enmities seem to have softened; others have revived and rage apace. Remarkable advances in medical technology are accompanied by a world epidemic barely known ten years ago, which now threatens tens of millions around the globe; others loom. Liberation movements have generally continued to grow and permeate world consciousness, even in the face of reaction and unsympathetic governments; yet fanatacism too seems on the rise. It is difficult to tell whether the shameful world gap between rich and poor, which is the source of most of the other ills of the planet, is widening or narrowing; what is certain is

v Introduction to the Second Edition that the time bomb of human population growth continues to tick away unchecked, while environmental degradation is barely beginning to be addressed. And while minority and identity groups assert their voices to the benefit of all of us, the socialization of men and boys, which is arguably the single most important sociopolitical block to a healthier world community, continues to be almost completely off the screen of our collective awareness. Not an optimistic picture on the whole, and yet there are grounds for hope. In our own country and many other parts of the world, at least, the days when race, gender, ethnicity, even sexual preference, could be automatically relied on to block individual and group advancement are long gone, perhaps forever. Abuses and wrongs of a wide range of types, from sexual immolation and abuse to genocide, which used to be held as secret, private, or normative, are more and more brought under public scrutiny and community jurisdiction-very much as an effect of television and the worldwide open network of communications. Nations which reach a certain level of pro~perity do seem to stabilize their politics and their populations, if no~ their ecological behavior, and to move toward participatory forms of government, which are at least generally less warlike than their authoritarian counterparts. The new world order whi~h is apparently emerging under megabusiness is at least biased against open warfare (it's••• •••bad••• ••• ••• for international trade) , and may in the end tum out to have more concern for the health of the planet and welfare of its citizens than nation states generally exhibited. Along with a tendency toward global horriogenization (and apart from the reactive formation of fanatic groups among those who feel left out), there is evidence of a new kind of local community and identity, frequently based not on place but some other affinity, relying on techological communication and often supportive of a much more pluralistic, caring, and responsible attitude by its members toward themselves, each other, and the whole of the globe. All these things and more suggest that if we are teetering on the brink, as a species and as a global ecosystem, still there are signs of the potential, at least, for a new world gestalt, which is to say a new way of conceiving and living a healthy, vibrant whole which is energized and informed by healthy, vibrant member parts which are themselves dynamic, growing wholes. This is the political potential of the gestalt perspective for the transformation of awareness and construction of meaning in the shared social field.

vi Introduction to the Second Edition

And again, in my view the part now most lagging behind in this transfonnation, and thus most blocking the emergence of new field organization, is the fixed gestalt of gender structures in the so-called "developed" world, in particular the failure to deconstruct the developmental self-structure of human maleness, which holds all our vision and all OUf lives hostage to a repetitive and self-perpetuating cycle of individualism, isolation, and destructive competitiveness and shame, inhibiting the unfolding of healthy self for each subjective person, and for the human community as a whole. Meanwhile, in our own microcosmic holon or metonym of all . this (the part which contains the whole), which is the world of Gestalt, change has been equally deep and rapid, if (I believe) more consistently positive. Ten years ago at the end of the 1980' s the Gestalt model seemed on the surface to be in the doldrums. Training in many places was declining, especially among the young, many of whom were put off by an approach which seemed to emphasize only separateness and differentiation in an increasingly fragmented and isolating world. Journal publication was meager throughout the world, and at times seemed to be mining a nearly exhausted vein, or talmudically poring over a few classic writings, in the way of the mainstream psychoanalytic literature Perls and Goodman had rejected forty years earlier. Articles and books outside the pale of Gestalt per se were steadily dropping all mention of the model, or relegating it to the status of a caricature in a belittling footnote on nude marathons and pillow-pounding parties. Book publication in Gestalt itself was at a virtual halt, while theoretical exposition, in the way of embattled systems in decline, often tended to devolve into factions and the expulsion of deviates from the dwindling band-with the focus on boundary issues of" what is" and "what is not" Gestalt, as determined by some authority, rather than on dialogue about the meaning and use of the core insights and premises of the model. Under the circumstances, new explorations and extensions tended to be posed as "Gestalt and... "-Gestalt and bodywork, Gestalt and T A, Gestalt and art therapy, and so on-rather than on how the model itself could revision and contextualize these various insights and areas, and thus lead to new approaches in an ever-widening range of applications. In the process we seemed to have lost a generation, and to be well on the way to losing another. But appearances can be deceiving. Under the surface new energy was stirring, both from new and older sources. New

vii Introduction to the Second Edition applications of the model, in areas ranging from child therapy to couples and families to groups, organizations, and political systems and institutions, were actually running far ahead of theoretical exposition-in seemingly blithe disregard of dark pronouncements from various voices that this or that application was "not Gestalt therapy" (echoing earlier pronouncements by Koehler, Henle, and other academic GestaItists that the whole synthesis initiated by Goodman and Perls was "not Gestalt psychology"). Around the world, partly inspired by American teachers faced with dwindling home markets, new programs and institutes were springing up and finding a ready audience across cultural boundaries -an audience both excited by and often sharply challenging of some tenets and traditions of the received model. New journals and professional associations would soon begin to appear in a range of countries and languages, to the point where today, ten years later, there are no fewer than seven significant Gestalt journals publishing in English alone (including one on the internet), and another dozen at least in other languages around the world. At the same time, much of this new activity did seem to be departing in various ways from some aspects at least of Goodman's and especially Perls' s work-and to be forging ahead without the grounding and clarifying support that'were actually available, in my view, in other aspects of our inherited model, as well as in the wider and older tradition of Gestv.lt psychology itself-particularly in the work of the very gifted second generation of Gestaltists, including Lewin, Golcistein, Gibson, and many others. Theoretical debate, if you could call it that, often seemed to be mostly a one-sided argument between a group which treated Goodman and Perls' s original text with a kind of reverential protectiveness, and the rest of the Gestalt world which seemed to regard it as a bewildering but ultimately irrelevant icon which could safely be genllflected to, and then ignored. This was the atmosphere and the historical moment in which I sat down to try to articulate my own perspective on these questions, very much under the stimulation of my teachers and fellow students at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, as well as many others. To me it seemed that" PHG" (or Perls, Hefferline & Goodman) was neither archaic and irrelevant-nor· was it complete, coherent, or for that matter consistent with itself. Rather, the more I read it, and the more I studied the writings of Lewin, other Gestaltists, and of course Perls and Goodman themselves, the more it seemed to me that PHG, while brilliant

viii Introduction to the Second Edition and endlessly fecund, was still more in the nature of a transitional text on the way to a fully Gestalt realization (the "beginning of Gestalt therapy," as Perls had retroactively and somewhat confusingly sub-titled his earlier work, Ego Hunger and Aggression, which actually had little or nothing to do with the revolution in cognitive/ affective models which the Gestalt psychology model sparked and represented). With PHG, Goodman at least was plainly sensing that the kind of revolution he and Perls sought to create in psychotherapy and human relations could not be based on the old objectivist, " associationist" model of cognitive/ emotive process which imbues Freud's work and underlay the psychotherapy of the times. And yet the synthesis the authors were offering with this work was still deeply mired, it seemed to me, in the old positivist, dualistic world view which separated" organism" from "environment" and consistently privileged something called "differentiation" and an individualist "autonomy" over our communal participation in and constituence out of a shared, co• regulated experiential field. At the same time, the authors could see-in some places dimly, in others more clearly-the outlines of a new theory of self which would be field based, truly phenomenological in a deeper sense than Husserl, Heidegger or the Existentialists had achieved, and radically transformative, ultimately, far beyond the confines of psychotherapy itself. Thus in the argument of my own book, the Gestalt model we were inheriting, applying, and trying to teach, had certain contradictions and paradigmatic inconsistencies at its core-and our failure to face and deconstruct these inconsistencies clearly was a main cause of both the stagnation of our field, and the wildly, sometimes comically divergent and contradictory activities that were being carried on under a "Gestalt" banner. Of course, it was ironical in the extreme that a model based presumptively on constructivism, destructuring, and the actively creative self organizing the field of experience, should itself suffer from a sort of theoretical fixed gestalt, and a paralyzed failure to apply its deconstructive and iconoclastic spirit to its own first, provisional formulations. But it was worse than ironical, in a world that was starving for holistic thinking and a healing new stance of awareness and transformative intervention, for that world to be deprived of this nourishing potential because of a reluctance on our part to clear out the dead wood and self• contradictions in our own most fertile text-and in some of its best-known and showiest public applications.

IX Introduction to the Second Edition Thus I took it as my task to begin, at least, this process of deconstruction and theoretical housecleaning, the destructuring that is the dynamic counterpart to the creation of something new, on more solid foundations. In particular it seemed to me that a revisiting and a new reading of the original Gestalt research, beginning nearly a century ago and then COntinuing with the work of Lewin in particular, would serve to ground the Gestalt therapy model in its true home, the fundamentally constructivist Gestalt psychology perspective-and at the same time would move us toward realization of the buried promise of that perspective, which Goodman hinted at but did not live, in the end, to return to: namely, the deconstruction of the most basic paradigm of our Western tradition itself, the paradigm of individualism, which is now choking the world and stultifying the development of individual and communal self-experience alike. This to me is the real potential of the entire Gestalt movement and its subjectivist, co-constructivist, meaning-based approach to human experience and human affairs, whose promise is implicit in the Gestalt psychological revolution, but can only be realized by our building together now on the more solid parts of the groundwork laid by Goodman and Perls with the Gestalt therapy approach, a half century ago. Gestalt therapy, that is, is rootless and ultimately comes to a Freudian dead end along with classical psychoanalysis, without its grounding in the radically transformative premises of the Gestalt psychology model; whereas Gestalt psychology, having revolutionized cognitive psychology and brain-mind models, cannot go on to complete its promise of a revolution in the premises of human nature itself, without the liberating perspective of Gestalt therapy, which takes the cognitive/ perceptual model into the living domains of phenomenology and the coconstruction of meaning-a project which Lewin envisioned and began, and Goodman sensed and advanced, but which it is up to us now to take further. This was the subject matter and the animating purpose of the book-to deconstruct the Gestalt model as it was then being taught and written about in many quarters (though again, applications were plainly running in advance of theory), to reground the Gestalt therapy model in Gestalt psychology, which I saw as its true home (thus freeing it from the clinging remnants of Freudian authoritarianism and the hyperindividualism of the drive model), and to reposition it to capitalize on its real potential, which is to integrate the wider fields of psychotherapy and psychology, and to support and construct a new, more fully

x Introduction to the Second Edition ecological model of self and self-experience (things which were both sketched and alluded to, and then contradicted and finally buried in Goodman's brilliant theoretical text) . To me, these were matters of passionate concern; but given the theoretical nature of the material, I was pleased to find a publisher at all-and delighted to find it in Gardner Press of New York, through the offices of GICPress, which was then barely more than a nascent and ambitious idea for a Gestalt series at a commercial publishing house. This was particularly gratifying, given that the "Cleveland School" of Gestalt therapy (if there is such a thing) was very much singled out in the book for deep if respectful criticism, as being among those in theory-if far from the worst in practice-where the individualistic, non• contextual, and "figure-bound" aspects of the Perlsian drive model were taught in uneasy and uncritical conjunction with the field-theory potential and implications of a fully Gestalt perspective. To me, this welcoming of a deeply critical point of view (which is not to say uncritical agreement!) is the very essence of the approach of the Cleveland group, and no doubt accounts for how that institute has managed to flourish over the decades, avoiding the schisms and ruptures that have characterized many Gestalt endeavors over the years (in thoughtless imitation of our psychoanalytic institute models). The Cleveland group stands for "a different way of holding differences" (in the words of a participant at the recent GIC conference on Gestalt approaches to children and adolescents). In the words of Sonia March Nevis, one of the institute founders, this honors the" true critical spirit of Fritz Perls" far more than those who would copy his style or even his characteristic theoretical emphases (Perls after all, like ] ung bu t unlike their common psychoanalytic mentor, never was interested in founding any "school" or method-much less in defending its boundaries or casting his own critics or reformers as heretics and renegades). It was this generous act on the part of Edwin Nevis, the founder of GICPress, that took me back to the institute which I had largely lost contact with since my own training there in the 70' s, first as list author, then coeditor at GICPress, then series editor and Director, and finally as a member of the OIC. teaching faculty. For this lowe an additional debt of gratitute to Edwin Nevis, to GIC, and to the book itself, for this embrace into what has been my primary (if critical! ) learning community for nearly a decade now, stimulating and supporting all of my subsequent work (in a full

xi Introduction to the Second Edition sense of the word "support," which includes vigorous differentiation as well as energetic joining) . But if the publication of the book pleased and gratified me, nothing prepared me for the small furor of controversy which greeted its actual release by Gardner Press in 1991. Given the theoretical treatment of the book' s topics, I expected few sales and fewer real readers-and those few I suppose I expected would generally agree with the book' s main points, which seemed incontrovertible to me: that our inherited model contained deep and unexamined contradictions at its core, at the paradigmatic level-contradictions which were both irreconcilable and inhibitory, if not paralyzing, to the applications and theoretical and practical advance of the model. That much seemed obvious to me, and well-documented in the book. As for my own proposed remedies to this, which involved regrounding the model in the Gestalt psychology legacy discussed above, and a resultant refocusing on the constructivist, phenomenological, and field-organizational promise of some aspects of Goodman' s thinking, here of course I expected some thoughtful, vigorous deconstruction of my own ideas, which I expected would emerge much influenced and improved from the dialogue. All this the book did get, from some quarters, both within this country and abroad. What took me aback was both an outpouring of enthusiasm and appreciation-and a concomitant outpouring of condemnation, in some cases quite vitriolic, of the ideas in the book as heretical, blasphemous, and actively dangerous! On the one hand were warmly appreciative reviews in the mainstream psychological press (and some parts of the Gestalt press) , the inclusion of the book as a featured selection of the major American psychology book club, and a steady stream of supportive letters. faxes, and calls from readers that continue to this day. On the other hand were reviews that seemingly couldn't find enough bad things to say about a book that dared to criticize the legacy of Perls, in particular, in any way. At times the argument of these critics seemed to rest on assertion and appeals to authOrity rather than on the issues or even on texts, and on some occasions the authors seemed not actually to have read the book (advancing counterarguments, for example, that were actually already in the text of the book itself). Clearly I had touched a nerve. Most distressing to me were voices where I had expected much resonance on the matter of the concerns I was trying to raise, along of course with differences when it came to my own

xii Introduction to the Second Edition proposed solutions-and instead seemed to be getting the retort that it was heresy even to raise questions about the individualist biases built into our supposedly field-oriented legacy, and the regressive dualism and objectivism of a drive-model, oral• aggression approach as a basis for theory and practice. In some cases I was personally anathematized, and my character was analyzed from afar for hidden power motives and conspiracy (I was a "stalking horse for Cleveland," which was a further irony, at a time when a group of us were trying to get that Institute, so long and so productively focused on the problems, real enemies, and creative possibilities in the larger world, to pay some attention to the smaller world of our common Gestalt community) . On one painful occasion I was heckled to the point of being unable to complete an invited presentation. At a major conference address in front of hundreds, the recognized dean of the Gestalt community leaned over the podium, fixed me with his eye, and pronounced that the ideas from "certain quarters" were "unconscionable" (the specific reference there was not only to this book, but to my suggesting in an article that it would be difficult or impossible to mount an effective critique of . fascism on the basis of Perls' s oral aggression model alone, given their common roots in a hypertrophied Nietzschean individualism. In all fairness, this same speaker, ever gracious in disagreement, invited me out after the session for a public drink) . As recently as last year it was proposed, in print, that some parts of the book (specifically the idea that ongoingly dynamic personal ground structures such as beliefs, preferences, and values prestructure and codetermine the emerging figure) should be "ritually expunged." This was no doubt intended as a bit of flamboyant hyperbole, and not a serious program, but it represents the flavor of some of these reactions. To be sure, there were many backhanded compliments in all of this. It was flattering in a way-and of course very good for sales-to be considered" dangerous," where my larger fear might have been to be ignored. I took it as a compliment that my work was pronounced too subversive for "beginners," though possibly tonic for the previously initiated, like some Victorian sex manual which must at all accounts be kept out of the hands of children and unmarried females, who might be instantly corrupted! And it continues to bemuse my GIC colleagues that I am tarred with the "Cleveland" brush (and vice versa-like others from that diverse and productive group I am often presumed to be speaking "for Cleveland," which is actually a vibrantly diverse community

xiii Introduction to the Second Edition

with a rich and productive fennent of ideas that vary widely, joined together not so much by common positions, as by a deeply shared commitment and thematic concern for taking the Gestalt model beyond its sometime focus on the individual in isolation. As I have written elsewhere, apparently this way of basing community on shared concern and interest is both more productive and more durable than a collectivity defined by certain agreed positions and answers to those concerns. Most gratifying of all, to me, are letters and other messages from younger colleagues and students who tell me they" came back" to the Gestalt model through this book, after being disaffected by . the hyperautonomy flavor of some other Gestalt teaching and writing-and then go on to say where they disagree with this or that idea or fonnulation in the text, which they find doesn't go far enough, or is misleading, or retains an unaware dualism and traces of the individualistic self model. I often find myself in agreement with these and other critics, and footnote them when I find myself incorporating their insights and fonnulations into my subsequent work. That was the book's reaction seven years ago, and ongoingly up to the present. Meanwhile, the landscape of Gestalt has been transfonned around the world. Today, according to the Gestalt Review, there are well over 150 active Gestalt training institutes in literally dozens of countries, with some thousands of current students and tens of thousands of past graduates and workshop participants. The two longest-established of these institutes, New York and Cleveland, are on the way to celebrating their fiftieth anniversaries, immediately after the tum of the millenium. Conferences, journals, and other collective activities abound. Book publishing in particular has both led and participated in this renascence: the GICPress list alone now amounts to some 25 tides in English, with far more than that number in translation around the world, while a variety of other presses, particularly Gestalt Journal Press in America and EHV in Gennany, have added richly to the available literature. Specific Gestalt conferences are devoted to particular applications• groups, couples, children, gender studies, lifecycle development, organizational dynamics, and others to come. Gestalt-trained consultants are active in many American and European corporations, and in government branches in the States up to and including the White House. This is both a vast re-enlivening and at the same time only a beginning of the impact I believe the model will eventually have, clinically,

xiv Introduction to the Second Edition organizationally, and politically. I like to think that Gestalt Reconsidered has had and continues to have its own small part in this exciting and urgently necessary project. Meanwhile, my own work has continued, and hopefully has continued to evolve. My next book-length project, with Cynthia Oudejans Harris, was the translation, editing, and introduction of The Collective Silence: Gernuzn Families and the Legacy of Shame (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993). In this rich and disturbing work a dozen Gestalt-trained German therapists, Jewish and non-Jewish, themselves coming from families which had variously included victims, perpetrators, resistors, and bystanders to the Holocaust, write of their own stories and those of their clients and others who continue to struggle with that most human task and drive, and the one which the gestalt model is uniquely positioned to help us with: namely, the integration of the whole field of experience, inner and outer, individual and family and societal, past present and future, into meaningful wholes and cohesive narratives-even when that process means the facing and incorporation of shameful secrets and unbearable truths. Along with Judith Brown's small poetic work on couples, Back to the Beanstalk (now reissued by GICPress, 1998), and the yet-unpublished work of Felicia Carroll on the Pinocchio tale, this book is among the first applications of a Gestalt approach to narrative therapy (and vice versa) . In the process both our understanding of the Gestalt model and our appreciation of story as the most basic human self-Gestalt are deepened and enhanced. While the book was ultimately published by Jossey-Bass, I will always be grateful to Gardner Spungin of Gardner Press for bringing us the project from Germany. As everyone who suffers or works with trauma knows, recovery and healing, even two and three generations later, are deeply inseparable from narration, relationship, and contact. Here, with the legacy of that most horrifying of all the sadly common stories of humankind's inhumanity to other humans, these creative principles come to life again in the ashes, with new and startling force. In the words of Joseph Zinker, himself a Holocaust survivor, this book is for everyone who is concerned with abuse, with multigenerational trauma in families, and with issues of guilt and shame. In On Intimate Ground: a Gestalt Approach to Working with Couples (Jossey-Bass, 1994) , coedited with Stephanie Backman, I tried to articulate the field-self ideas drawn from Goodman and clarified somewhat, hopefully, in Gestalt

xv Introduction to the Second Edition

Reconsidered, in their essential applications and implications in the area of intimate process. My particular concern here was to demonstrate that intimacy, the intersubjective exploration of the "inner" realm of the experiential field, is the essential coconstructive process of self-creation itself, and not the "reporting out" of a preexistent individual self, which somehow developmentally preceded relationship. That is, the self is articulated and cocreated in intimate process-as opposed to the older, more dualistic "contact precedes relationship" view, which seems to me to contravene the deepest principles of the Gestalt model. This goes beyond the interactive" organism• environment" language and perspective of much older Gestalt work, in favor of a field language where" self' and" other" are mutually, dynamically interdependent aspects of self-experience, and not the polar opposites that they sometimes seem to be in much of Perls's writing, and for that matter much of the Western tradition of psychology and philosophy as a whole. Today I find much support and much clarifying language for this perspective in parallel writings from the "co-regulation" perspective (see especially Alan Fogel's Developing Through Relationships, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. I am particularly indebted to Eric Erickson of the Esalen Institute in California for bringing this work to my attention, and for his own model of intersubjective development, which is infused with a Gestalt perspective and which represents a considerable advance, I believe, over much previous intersubjective writing). The developmental and process tasks of intimacy, I tried to show here, look considerably different when viewed from this Gestalt perspective-as long as by Gestalt we understand a field perspective which deconstructs the individualist self model and regrounds it in phenomenological and constructivist field theory. This project, of using the Gestalt perspective to deconstruct the Western legacy of the individualistic self model, I then took up again and tried to take further in The Voice of Shame: Silence and Connection in Psychotherapy (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996), very much in a process of cocreation with my longtime colleague and coeditor on that volume, Robert Lee. Lee brought to that project a deep grounding in affect theory in general and shame research in particular, together with the recognition that much of what contemporary shame theory was trying to address, the Gestalt model was also trying to handle, but in different and sometimes limited language. I brought my ongoing study of Gestalt theory, in particular self theory and the use of the Gestalt

xvi Introduction to the Second Edition model to leverage ourselves out of our own dominant, inherited paradigm of individualism. Each of us felt strongly that the use of a Gestalt lens to understand shame dynamics in field perspective, and the application of the implicit field implications of shame and affect theory to our evolving Gestalt model, would benefit and ultimately transform both perspectives. Specifically, the integration of both perspectives led us to the articulation of a Gestalt language of shame as the indicator of field conditions of support and non-reception, and thus as the phenomenological modulator of contact in subjective field-organization. Working with Bob Lee for two years on this collaboration was certainly one of the richest experiences, of my professional life, and I think I speak for both of us in saying that the calibre of the authors who came together to contribute to the collection, and the quality of those contributions—together with the depth and range of the new dialogue in Gestalt that was opened up by the topic of shame itself—were in the end the deepest satisfactions of the project. Following this articulation, I finally felt far enough along with a field model of self-process to go ahead with a project long in process, which was the outlining of field considerations and issues for a Gestalt model of development (and one that would go beyond the implicit developmental model left to us by Perls, who basically had just reiterated the Freudian map of development in Gestalt language, as progress from confluence to autonomy, a model, needless to say, which many of us who work in Gestalt with children, in particular, had long found hopelessly individualist, dualistic, drive-based and gender-typed). This I tned to articulate in the lead theoretical section of Volume I of AL twoTVOlum^ collection The Heart of Development: Gestalt approaches ta Working with Children, Adolescents, and their Worlds (Hillsdale NJ.-The Analytic Press, 1998), co-edited with Mark McConvilIe. In this report on a model-in-progress, I drew very much on several years' collaboration and exchange with Mary Ann Kraus in particular, and also with Mark McConvilIe (who had already written the first Gestalt book on adolescence; Jossey- Bass 1996), as well as the members of the New England Gestalt Study Group and the CISC annual Gestalt Writers' Conference both under the generous auspices of Edwin C. Nevis and Sonia March Nevis. These two books grew out of the 1996 GIC Conference with the same title, which was the first Gestalt gathering of its kind on working with children and adolescents Both the conference and the books were graced by the presence and inspiration of Violet Oaklander, the founder of the field of

xvii Introduction to the Second Edition Gestalt work with children, and both took me back to my first graduate and clinical work, which was in child development and child therapy, which I was more and more drawn back to as my own five children grew up and entered school. My own clinical writings to date on children, which were scattered through various books and journals, were then collected in the book• length monograph Love and Play: Essays in Gestalt Work with Children and Adolescents (GICPress, 1997)-a collection whose title alone signals my dissatisfaction with a traditional Freudian, individualist approach to human development in general, and work with children in particular. I next tried to pull all these related themes and threads together-the refocusing of the Gestalt model away from drive theory and dualism and toward a phenomenolOgical field approach, the resultant field-theory of self, which builds on Goodman's insights, the consequences of this model for a field theory of development, and the essential dynamic roles of intimacy and shame in this process-in In Search of Self: Beyond Individualism in Working with People (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1998). Here I attempt to use this revised Gestalt model to address the developmental self issues of contact and subjective field organization, relationship, shame, support, intimacy, and gender, all in a new perspective. The aim in this book is to present these theoretical issues in a hands-on, user-friendly way-without losing sight of the radical goals and implications of Gestalt itself, which is nothing less than a complete paradigmatic shift of vision, away from the individualistic self-model which has dominated the West since at least the time of the Greeks, and in favor of an ecological field model of interpenetrating selves, which is dialOgic, intersubjective, coconstrucrivist-and as I believe, fully Gestalt. Here as elsewhere, I think my overriding concerns and foci have remained those that I articulated in the introduction to Love and Play, and which have animated all my work: II self, gender, development, intimate dialogue, support and shame, individualism and relationship, psychotherapy and the lives of children (and adults), all viewed in Gestalt perspective. II Currently, my writing and much of my teaching focus on the integration of all these themes-self and relationship, support and shame, intimacy and development-in form of the social gender code, which I spoke of above as perhaps our most crucial and neglected task of deconstruction now in psychology and in human relations in general-and particularly neglected as it

xviii Introduction to the Second Edition

relates to the lives and socialization of men. With the 1998 GIC Conference "Gender Experiences: Narrative, Dialogue and Empowerment, " a group of us from a number of Gestalt institutes took it as our task to support the ongoing articulation of new Gestalt-based perspectives on these issues, for our model and for the culture at large-very much with the idea that these perspectives would also yield a series of new Gestalt books and articles on these topics. In the array of liberation and reform movements that have marked world culture over the past half century in particular, those movements which are broadly grouped under the heading of feminism and women's rights have stood out as particularly unifying and transformative (in interaction of course with the many other creative strands in this rich tapestry-the rights of oppressed racial, religious, and ethnic groups, the protection of children, sexual liberation and the expressive rights of sexual II minorities, II the ecological movement and the protection of species, and the peace and social justice movements in general) . In psychology and psychotherapy in particular, feminist critique and deconstructive ferment have sparked the questioning of long-accepted beliefs and assumptions, and led to the generation of new thinking and models in self, development, ethics, social policy, and a host of other areas. In the process it has often been assumed that the psychological models we already had were "male models," which fit the male but not the female case, and now must be supplemented with their complements or polar opposites. The world we know, according to this argument, is II made for men, II and now must be somewhat restructured to accomodate the legitimate and equal needs of women. But if we consult our own needs and experience, or that of our sons, brothers, and fathers, it is plain that the world we have was not made" for" anybody, in any deep or real sense-not even for the minority of rich and powerful, male and female, who are themselves condemned to live, as Gestaltist and social activist Philip Lichtenberg has pointed out, lives of fear, constriction, and defensive isolation (which is of course not to compare their lot with that of the poor [Lichtenberg, Community and Confluence: Undoing the Clinch of Oppression, Cleveland: GICPress, 1994]). Freud himself was at least aware of not knowing" what women want" (a question he seems to have been careful not to put to any actual women) j in the case of men, it plainly didn't even occur to him that he didn't know.

xix Introduction to the Second Edition

Rather, what we have in the West, articulated in the pages of Homer, handed down more or less intact, scientized and universalized by Freud and celebrated uncritically by Perls and many, many others, is something more in the nature of a psycho-ideology of manhood-not what men want or dream, or how the world might be were it run to their or anybody' s needs, but rather a cultural program for what men are supposed to want, and then for sOcializing them to lose voice for any other wants and needs, the mere awareness of which can be a mark of failure as a man. Thus the whole program is held in place by shame, and sealed by the silence that shame always engenders-whether in child and family abuse, in post-Holocaust studies, in millions upon millions of women who suffer violence in isolation around the globe, or further millions upon millions of men who commit violent acts, march like sheep off to war, drug and kill themselves, or just live in depression and denial, rather than undergo the unsupported (ie, shameful) experience of facing and giving voice to their real needs alone, at the price and under the menace of this public brand of failure and shame. All of us owe a great debt of gratitude to the feminist movement, and to feminist writers (including some in the Gestalt community, like Cynthia Cook, Iris Fodor, Mary Ann Kraus, Miriam Polster and others), for making us aware that women's needs and women's stories are ill served by an ideal of development which privileges something called "self-sufficiency" (an oxymoron, in Gestalt terms), and a phobic stance toward intimacy and interdependence, over connection, relationship, committed caretaking, and the transpersonal dimension in all its forms. Now we have to finish this task of deconstruction, which is ultimately the destructuring of the individualist self-model, and with it all our inherited, paradigmatic ideas about self, development and gender. Our tools for this project are the insights of the Gestalt model, about the nature and function of self in integrating not just some defended inner space, but the whole field of experience, and the process of real dialogue itself, which the Gestalt model is likewise uniquely well-positioned to support and explain. The progress of aU the other movements and causes we care about-peace and world economic justice, the environment, the rights of children and of all people-all depends now on our joining in this task, which begins with men telling their real stories, but must extend from there to include everyone. My own current work, which is a deconstructive study of masculinity and male identity formation based on the

xx Introduction to the Second Edition counters tory of Troy in Homer's Iliad, long the bible of Western manhood, is meant to be a contribution to that wider movement and cause. The philosopher Ken Wilber tells us that the age of mass warfare-which is also the age of dualism and its concomitants, sexism, slavery and conquest, and environmental depradation• began some four or five thousand years ago with the advent of large-scale agriculture, leading in tum to the growth of cities and the fonnation of large land annies. We are now at last passing out of that long dark age-the age of warfare-into an uncertain future. The Gestalt model teaches us that in that long process certain things haven't changed-among them our inborn drive to create relationship and meaning (the two primal human urges which both Winnicott and Goldstein, using different models, called the "only drives"). But this is anoher way of saying that our future will be what we make of it, meaning in tum that our vision of what is possible, and what it is our deepest nature to need and dream of, is a crucial codetenninant of that future. This book was intended first of all to offer a different vision of our past, with a view toward changing and enlarging our view of our present situation, our future possibilities, and our full human potential for creativity and the generation of new fonns, new wholes of meaning.

xxi I N T R o D u C T I o N

AN INTRODUCTION, AS Erik Erikson has observed, is an author's chance to put his or her afterthoughts first. In Gestalt terms, this makes for a contact boundary of a particular kind, charged and organized in particular ways, between author and reader, just before plunging into the material ahead. On the one hand there is the author, just back, so to speak, from the territory that still lies more or less hidden from the reader, caught at a mo• ment of withdrawal or reflection after that journey, and oriented by the feelings and concerns that belong to that phase of the con• tact cycle: satisfaction perhaps, and a gathering excitement about sharing the journey with another person, but also quite possibly sadness and loss, apprehension about others' reception of this presentation of self, proprietorship and protection, even an antici• patory defensiveness-all those sensations and feelings, in short, that may go along with what Paul Goodman taught us to call the resistance of egotism, that fear of loss or damage to the self, a last• ditch attempt to hold back from, or control at least, the crucial moment of letting go, which is the encounter itself. And on the other hand, there is the reader, at an entirely dif• ferent point in the rhythm of engagement or contact, and with quite another agenda of felt desires, needs, apprehensions, which will organize the ground of the figure of contact of the moment and in turn shape the approach to the larger contact ahead. At• tention or distraction, excitement or relative indifference, open• ness or caution, suspicion, trust, compliance with authority, the defensiveness or giving of the self to the encounter mentioned above on the author's side-all of these, in all their possible blends

1 Introduction and shadings, enter into the dynamic organization of the reader's contact boundary, which, as Goodman says, is not a point or place but rather a process, the "organ of a particular relationship," which is contact itself (F. Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951, p. 269). To paraphrase Kurt Lewin (and thereby anticipate the argument of Chapter I), the felt purpose or need will organize the encounter on both sides-within the given conditions, and with the support or constraint of each person's own particular capacity for a flexi• ble range of attitudes, or styles of approach, appropriate to those felt goals and conditions (which is in turn the particular subject matter of psychotherapy). In other words, a few brief strokes and already we have sug• gested the outlines, at least, of a contact moment which is com• plexly organized and richly political (in the sense of having to do with relationship or influence), and very far indeed from the Perls/Goodman Platonic ideal of a "clear bright figure freely energized from an empty background" (emphasis added; F. Perls et al., 1951, p. 299). And the main event hasn't even begun yet! Small wonder then, under the given contact conditions, which is to say the background goals and structures on both sides, if authors commonly try to use introductions to prestructure, or in• fluence if possible, the outcome of the fuller contact ahead, which is the encounter with the main text itself. Generally this attempt takes the form of a sort of guided tour, or preview, of the land• scape yet to come, pointing out various attractive features, minimiz• ing or sidestepping the pitfalls, and especially indicating where the reader should come out on the other side, and what the right route is for getting there. Fair enough, but it should be clear by now that this is no ordinary roadmap, such as might be given to the innocent traveler by some well-meaning yet dispassionate guide-if such a thing existed!-but rather is itself a highly partisan docu• ment, an invitation to "map" the contact process itself in certain ways and not others, according to certain pre-agreed features of the ground. And here again, in only a few brief paragraphs we have arrived at one of the fundamental cornerstones of the Good• man/Per1s philosophical critique of "establishment" psychotherapy of the time: namely, the radical, positive reevaluation of passionate desire, as the essential pathway to truth and right action-in sharp contradiction to both the classical Freudian and, for that matter, the Eastern mystical views, of enlightenment through objectivity,

2 Introduction sublimation, or detachment. Likewise, on the reader's side (and in anticipation of much of the argument below), let us recognize and honor her or his resistance as the very sign of passionate or mobilized engagement, in the process of contact itself- and not as a block or subversion of that process. So far so good, but there is at least one further risk to this sort of partisan preview, which is that in the course of mapping out the terrain ahead, and trying to make the various stages of the journey seem to follow seamlessly and inevitably one after the other, it may well be that the whole argument of the book takes on a more tightly logical character, a more linear appearance, than it had in its original development, which may have been more organic, more back-and-forth, from central idea to component parts-in a word, more "Gestalt." In the process, it may happen that the most basic thesis of a book, the central energizing idea that infuses and organizes the parts, is nowhere stated clearly (as the reassessment of desire, which underlies Volume II of Gestalt Therapy, is not directly discussed in that book). Let us state, then, that central organizing idea before proceeding with the roadmap of the chapters to come: namely, that the model of contact handed down to us by Goodman and Perls, and elaborated by many subse• quent authors, is figure-bound, in a theoretical sense; that the analysis of this contact process (or awareness, or experience) is in• complete without direct consideration of organized features or struc• tUTes of ground, enduring in some cases across situations and over time, that infuse and constrain the figures of contact themselves; that psychotherapy (or any change induction process) is always a matter of reorganization of these structures of ground over time, and not merely of contact figures of the moment; that the Gestalt model, theoretically at least, has been hampered by this over• emphasis on figure from addressing a full range of clinical and systemic problems; that the Goodman/Perls model contains cer• tain distortions or internal contradictions which have worked against development of this full potential; and finally, that the revi• sion of these contradictory propositions permits the emergence of a model with certain new capacities-namely, the reevaluation of "resistances," and the possibility of addressing "clinical" and "organizational" problems for the first time in the same theoretical terms. All of these are formulations of the same basic idea, which is the focusing of direct attention, in Gestalt analysi8, on the ques-

3 Introduction tion of structures of ground. To focus that attention is the purpose of this book.

To set the stage for this discussion, and in the process indicate certain theoretical roads not taken, we will first of all go back to the early part of this century, in Chapter I, to consider some of the fascinating, revolutionary work of the first generation of academic Gestalt psychologists, principally Wertheimer, Koffka, Kohler, and their followers-work so radically influential that it is impossible to conceive of any psychology at all today, even the most thoroughgoing "behaviorism," which is not fundamentally Gestalt in nature. From there we will take up the outgrowth of this work in the concerns of the second generation of the "Gestalt School," particularly Lewin and Goldstein-not because their far• reaching elaborations of the original perceptual model into the domains of personality and behavior directly influenced the Good• man/Perls model, but because, curiously enough, they did not• for reasons considered more directly in Chapters II and III. In all of this we will be arguing in conscious opposition to the positions of Henle (1978), Arnheim (1949), and (sometimes) Perls himself (see for example 1969b), all of whom have maintained that connections between Gestalt psychology per se and the Gestalt therapy model are either not centrally important or else wholly nonexistent. On the contrary, in Chapter I (and the succeeding chapters) we will try to show that the connections are direct and essential, if not always fully developed. Perls himself first sensed this link, even if he failed to articulate it clearly, in his early collaborative work with his wife Laura, Ego, Hunger and Aggression (F. Perls, 1947). It is to this early work of Perls that we will turn our attention directly in Chapter II. From the point of view of the later Gestalt model, the book, to use the author's own word, is "sketchy" at best: the Gestalt ideas promised at the outset are nowhere developed through most of the text, and when at last they are touched upon, briefly, at the end, the connection with a Gestalt perspective is not made clear. For these reasons, a disclaimer at this point may be in order, at the risk of belaboring what is beyond contention: namely, that there would be no Gestalt therapy model without Fritz Perls. It was Perls, as just mentioned above, who first "sniffed" the implications of a Gestalt view of awareness, for a new approach to personality and psychotherapy (true, those im-

4 Introduction plications were pregnantly present, as argued in Chapter I, in the earlier work of Lewin and Goldstein, but Perls may have been unaware of Lewin, and by his own account [1969bj, he did not understand Goldstein's work until many years later}. It was Perls, together with Laura Perls, who drew together the study group that gave birth to the Gestalt therapy model itself, in New York in the years immediately after World War II. And it was Perls, by all ac• counts, who gave Paul Goodman an original monograph, which was the jumping-off point, at least, of Goodman's fuller theoretical presentation in 1951. Readers of this chapter who knew Perls have generally commented that something essential of the man himself -his presence, his commitment to liveliness and authenticity, his own particular kind of integrity or wholeness-does not come through in this more purely theoretical critique. Perls stood, in the words of Ed Nevis, for a "whole new way of being in the world," of listening for and honoring what was true within, before the closure of a premature resignation about what was possible, or prac• tical, or readily acceptable socially. Perhaps it is inevitable for those of us in a later generation who did not have the chance to be moved by Perls personally that something of the inspirational force of the contact should be lost on the page. Suffice it to say here that when we speak of Perls in the chapters below, we mean Perls the writer, and more specifically the actual written work he left behind-none too extensive, in comparison with his actual influence on contem• porary psychotherapy-and not the man himself. Turning to Chapter III, the work of Goodman (in indeterminate collaboration with Perls and others), we will have arrived at last at a full-scale model of Gestalt therapy itself-or at any rate a full theoretical rationale for such a model, and a suggestion of what that model might look like in application over time (to a degree not always appreciated in the Gestalt literature, it was left to other writers and teachers, notably Laura Perls, lsdore From, Erv and Miriam Polster, Joseph Zinker, and many others to do the de• manding theoretical and practical work of developing this rationale into a clinical and educational methodology, with of course many extensions and refinements along the way). But who is the author of this original presentation? Goodman claimed authorship, from a basis of a preliminary monograph of Perls's (Wysong, 1985), and publicly, at least, this claim seems never to have been disputed (though Joel Latner, for one, does assert that Perls's original manu- 5 Introduction script \vas somewhat more elaborated and closer to the final version than Goodman would seem to allow; Latner, personal communica• tion to E. Nevis, 1988). However this may be, a comparison of published texts does seem sufficient to establish that the authorial voice of Gestalt Therapy, Vol. II is Goodman's-regardless of how collaborative the thinking that lay behind the voice itself. The figure, we may say, is Goodman, though the ground certainly included Perls, Laura Peds, and others as well. Moreover, there are certain clear discrepancies of emphasis, at least, between the exposition here and other work published under Perls's name, both before and after-which again reveal the organizing hand of Good• man in this volume. And finally, there are both discrepancies and some outright contradictions between Volume I and Volume II of the book (some of which are discussed in detail in Chapter III)• all of which again supports Goodman's contention that he "wrote" the second volume, in a different sense from that in which he con• tributed to the first. Therefore, in this chapter and throughout the book, when we use the formulation "Goodman said," or varia• tions on it, we will understand that to mean at least that Good• man himself subscribed to the particular proposition or argument in question, since it appears in his voice-without prejudice to the question of whether the coauthors did or did not share that par• ticular view, or what share they had, exactly, in generating it. Chapter IV will take up directly some of the "extensions and refinements" mentioned above-in particular those of what we will be calling the Cleveland School, itself constituting a diverse body of work which is nevertheless united by certain recurrent themes and concerns. A theory, as suggested above, is not necessar• ily a method, though it may contain one, and either may imply the other. It is one thing to say, as Goodman does, that the new therapy will attend to the "internal structure of the actual ex• perience" (Perls et aI., 1951, p. 273), and quite another to layout in practical and theoretical detail exactly how that is to be done, by what method, and with what sequence of interventions on the therapist's part. Again, it was the writers of the Cleveland School• including especially the Nevises, the Polsters, Zinker, and others• who undertook the creative labor of articulating this methodology (in the literal sense of identifying joints, or points of boundary and connection). As Goodman is to Perls, in the sense of taking a brilliant initial insight and working it into a full and coherent

6 Introduction theoretical statement, so the Cleveland writers, over the past four decades, have been, in a sense, to Goodman. Thus the classic work of the Polsters, outlining what is meant, in the Gestalt sense, by contact and the resistances; of Zinker, with his deeply insightful and carefully dramatic elaboration of the Gestalt experiment; or the Nevises, with their extensions of the model into applications to multi person systems. In many of these written works and much of their teaching, writers of the Cleveland group and others (like their teachers Laura Perls and Isadore From) have sometimes raised many of the same concerns and misgivings about certain parts of the received theory that constitute the central subject of this book. As befits a methodology-building stage of theory development, their answer, in some cases, was to address the problems in terms of method itself. Thus issues such as group and social ground, intimate com• mitment, the creative uses of "resistances," problems of "character" and "personality," the use of personal history in psychotherapy, are frequent themes in this body of writing and teaching. What we would add now, at a later stage in a wider theory-building cycle, is the direct focus of attention on those areas of the original model that make it hard to address these concerns in a consistent and fully practical way, and those neglected extensions of academic Gestalt psychology into these realms that would support those concerns. In Chapter Y, we turn to the integration of all that has gone before: the use of the Lewinian and Goldsteinian models to develop the concept of structured ground; the consequences of this organ• izational approach for the awareness theory of change and change induction; the resultant shift of emphasis in the definition of con• tact itself; the revised understanding of the "resistances" that flows from this shift (revised theoretically; in practice this revision, we will argue, has been around for a long time); and the integrated model itself, which, we will be claiming, can address the full range of human and clinical problems outlined above in a more consis• tent, more flexible, more fully "Gestalt" way. To repeat, far from being taken up in an "anti-Peds" or "anti-Goodman" spirit, these arguments are intended to return us to the basic premises of their model, by way of addressing certain incomplete or neglected features of that model, which are more salient, more figural, in our time than in theirs. And finally, along the way, as a methodo-

7 Introduction logical dividend, so to speak, of the insistence on starting with ground, not figure, we will come out with a model, by these arguments, which can at last address intrapsychic and interper• sonal or systemic problems in the same theoretical language• something that has been eluding clinicians, among others, since the time of Freud. And with this, our (partisan) preview of the territory ahead is virtually complete. (Whether the arguments presented in these five chapters are complete or not lies with the reader to judge.) In general, with the exception of certain illustrative material from early Gestalt research in Chapter I, case examples and narrative vignettes have been kept out of the text up to this point, in hopes of achieving a narrative rhythm and clarity of a different, more theoretical kind. On the one hand, each chapter is intended to be able to stand alone, and the reader who is more interested in one topic than another should be able to read any single chapter• or for that matter all the chapters in any order-and still get the gist, at least, of the overall argument, which is recapitulated in each new stage of its presentation. On the other hand, each successive chapter attempts to take up this theoretical narrative and advance it in the direction outlined above (and note the tone of partisan linearity, creeping back into the tour guide at this point). With the final two chapters, in hopes of redressing this theory/practice im• balance at least to some extent, two groups of cases are presented, one group in the "clinical" area and the other in the social or organizational domain (keeping in mind that with the revisions developed through the previous chapters, it should be possible to address these different "levels" of a problem in the same terms). To repeat a point already mentioned here, and frequently reiterated in the chapters ahead, we are not claiming to be the first to do this under the Gestalt model. Rather, the position here is that the best and most creative Gestalt practice is already doing many or most of the things advocated under this theoretical revision. But, by the contention here, "best practice" in the Gestalt model is not everywhere supported by theory, but is forced to make cer• tain habitual leaps, unexplained reversals, or fuzzy connections. This is all very well if you know what you are doing, but it is very hard to teach! Thus, in a real sense, it is Gestalt teaching that this book most hopes to influence, with the aim of supporting and pass• ing on that creative practice, out of a better-organized theoretical ground. 8 Introduction

And an (almost) final word, again about Goodman and Perls. H is commonplace for revisionists to claim that they are returning to the basics, which have somehow become lost or distorted over time-or even that they are uniquely placed to explain what the masters really meant, better than those masters could themselves. It is also commonplace, these days, to take note of the fact that much of Perls's work, particularly in later years, was a theatrical display of only one corner, so to speak, of the Gestalt model he had been so instrumental in developing, and that if not actually a caricature of that model, some of this work quickly lent itself to caricature in the hands of other, less disciplined showmen (and showwomen). Like a Hokusai simplifying his brushwork with age, Perls used shortcuts and rapid strokes that quickly became lifeless cliches in the hands of some of his imitators, who saw them not as grounded leaps to the heart of the impasse, but short circuits around a necessary lifetime of clinical and cultural experience. Thus the common practice, nowadays, of taking a few ritual easy shots at Perls by way of distancing one's own position from a certain kind of "Gestalt" practice that has fallen into well-deserved ill• repute. That is not the intent of this presentation, nor is that the view of Perls himself espoused here, whatever the differences of theoretical emphasis developed in these chapters, and however inadequate the presentation, particularly in Chapter II, of Perls• the-clinician and Perls-the-man. Perls, in spite of the contradic• tions in his life and his theoretical perspective, stood always and clearly, figure-and-ground, for authenticity, liveliness, and adven• ture (in the true sense, of risking the self in the encounter). This is not to say he would have endorsed all the arguments of this book. But he certainly would, if he had lived, say, another ten or fifteen years, have turned his famous impatience and his withering eye on the common clinical problems of these days, which we have been identifying as distortions not just of figure, but of structured ground: anomie, consumerism, me-firstism, lack of commitment, personal and political, and those related problems of the unpas• sionate heart that present so frequently in the clinical (and non• clinical) population of our times. One imagines, with relish, some hapless latter-day hot-seat victim, under the lash of the famous Persian scorn: "Get out of here! I can't work with you. You're not committed to anything." Likewise, and more so, for Paul Goodman. Today, after the near-total eclipse of Goodman's literary and political/philosophical 9 Introduction work, it is only a matter of time until he is again recognized for what he was and is: namely, one of the centrally influential, critically intellectual voices of the "American Mid-Century," and one of its exemplary stylists. To echo the text ahead, it has been an im• measurable loss for Gestalt therapy, and a tragic one for our times, that Goodman did not live to bring his obsidian eloquence and his vast intellectual resources to bear on the different problems (or different manifestations of the same problem) of the individual• in-society in our times. It is easy to forget today that Goodman, while prophetically critical, was by no means a voice crying in the wilderness in his own day. On the contrary, he was enormously, directly influential in the whole range of liberation movements of the fifties and sixties-including the movement to liberate psycho• therapy from the stale confines of the Freudian training institutes (today so much less stale, partly because of the competitive in• fluence of the Gestalt model), and not least in his influence on the shaping of the mind of a whole generation that would trust its own visceral repugnance to an obscene war, in opposition to all the authoritarian force of the day. Goodman, if he were alive at this writing, would be only as old as the current President of the United States. Even to voice the comparison is to cry out at what this society is capable of doing to the very best of its men and women.

And a penultimate word, on usage. People come, with only the very rarest exceptions, in definite genders, one or the other. The English language, however, provides only the feminine gender with a set of pronouns all its own, while the masculine set does triple duty, for the male, the collective, and sometimes the impersonal cases. Exactly to whose disadvantage this works most is unclear, as with so many things in gender politics. Meanwhile, the cumber• someness of always repeating the locutions "he or she," "her and his," and so forth, is already apparent in this introduction. At the same time, the use of they and their to refer to the singular imper• sonal everyone is confusing and unacceptable. Therefore, with apologies to all sides, and in hopes of better times in the language and in the culture, in this text the unsatisfactory traditional prac• tice will be followed, of using he, his, and him to cover both the masculine and the general case.

1 0 Introduction

Finally, this book, like any book, is a conversation, or one side of a conversation, which is continued in the reader's mind, and then completed, if the author is lucky, in some ongoing expres• sion of response. But this conversation itself is the outgrowth of many, many past conversations, which have entered and organ• ized the ground for this figure. Thanks go to the following past conversational partners-teachers, students, colleagues, and friends-for their creative agreement and disagreement, challenge and support, all of which have infused and informed the present figure of contact: Anne Alonso, Norm Berkowitz, Rennie Fantz, Isadore From, Murray Horwitz, Michel Katzeff, Frank Kelly, Carolyn Lukensmeyer, Bert Moore, Ed Nevis, Sonia Nevis, Bernie O'Brien, Patricia Papernow, Erv Polster, Jean-Marie Robine, the late Bill Warner, Joseph Zinker, and Walter Grossman, men• tor and living model of the Goodman ideal of a passionate intellec• tual, and a complete man; and most of all to my professional, con• versational, and life partner, Beverly Reifman.

1 1 References

Table of Contents

INDEX References

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Davidove, D. M. (1985). The contribution of Paul Goodman. The Gestalt Journal, VIII(I), 72-77. Ehrenfels, von C. (1890). Ueber Gestaltqualitaeten (On gestalt pro• perties). Viertel;ahresschrift fuer Philosophie 14. Erikson, E. (1951). Childhood and society. New York: Norton. Exner, A. (1894). Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklaerung der psychischen Erscheinungen (Sketch for a physiological explana• tion of psychic appearances). Vienna: Deutike. Fagan, J. (1970). The tasks of the therapist. In Fagan, J. & Shepherd, I. (Eds.), Gestalt therapy now. New York: Science and Behavior Books. Fantz, R. E. (1975). Fragments of gestalt theory. Unpublished manuscript (available in reprint from the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland). --- (1987). Gestalt approach. In Fosshage, J. & Loew, C. (Eds.), Dream interpretation. New York: PMA Publishing Corp. Fingarette, H. (1988). Heavy drinking. Berkeley: University of California Press. Freud, A. (1937). The ego and the mechanisms of defense. New York: International Universities Press, Inc. Freud, S. (1894). The neura-psychoses of defence. In Strachey, J. (Ed.), The standard edition, 3,45-61. London: Hogarth Press (1953-). --- (1900). The interpretation of dreams. In Strachey, J. (Ed.), The standard edition, 4-5. London: Hogarth Press (1953-). --- (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. In Strachey, J. (Ed.), The standard edition 7. London: Hogarth Press (1953-). --- (1914). The case of the wolf-man/from the history of an in• fantile neurosis. In Strachey, J. (Ed.), The Standard edition, 17, 7-122. London: Hogarth Press (1953-). --- (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. In Strachey, J. (Ed.), The standard edition, 18,3-64. London: Hogarth Press (1953-). --- (1923). The ego and the id. In Strachey, J. (Ed.), The standard edition, 19, 3-66. London: Hogarth Press (1953-). --- (1930). Civilization and its discontents. In Strachey, J. (Ed.), The standard edition, 21. London: Hogarth Press (1953-). --- (1938). An outline of psychoanalysis. In Strachey, J. (Ed.), The standard edition, 23. London: Hogarth Press (1953-). --- (1985). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess. Masson, J. M. (Ed.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press. From, I. (1978). An oral history of Gestalt therapy, part 2: a conver• sation with Isadore From (conducted by Rosenfeld, E). The Gestalt Journal, 1(2), 8-27. References

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Katz, D. (1911). Die Erscheinungsweiseo der Farben und ihre Beeinflussung durch die individuelle Erfahrung (The ap• pearances of colors and their influence through individual ex• perience). Zeitschrift fuer Psycho logie, 7. Katzeff, M. (1977). Comment se realiser dans la vie quotienne et pro• fessionelle (Self-realization in daily and professional life). Brussels: Multiversite. Kepner, E. & Brien, L. (1970). Gestalt therapy and behavioristic phenomenology. In Fagan, J. & Shepherd, 1. (Eds.), Gestalt therapy now. New York: Science and Behavior Books. Kepner,1. (1987). Body pocess: a Gestalt approach to working with the body in psychotherapy. New York: Gardner Press/Gestalt In• stitute of Cleveland Press. Koffka, K. (1915). Toward a foundation for perceptual psychology. In Ellis, W. (Ed.), A source book of gestalt psychology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd. (1938). --- (1935). Principles of Gestalt psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Koehler, W. (1915). Optische Untersuchungen am Schimpansen und am Haushuhn (Optical investigations on the chimpanzee and the domestic chicken). Berliner Abhandlung, 1915, 3. --- (1920). Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationaeren Zustand (Physical Gestalts at rest and under stationary condi• tions). Berlin: Braunschweig. --- (1922). Zur Theorie der stroboskopischen Bewegungen (Toward a theory of stroboscopic motion). Psychologische Forschung, 3. --- (1925). The mentality of apes. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. --- (1927). Zum Problem der Regulation (On the problem of regulation). Roux Archiven fuer Entwicklungsmechanik 112. --- (1938). The place of value in a world of facts. New York: Liveright. --- (1940). Dynamics in psychology. New York: Liveright. --- (1947). Gestalt psychology. New York: Liveright. --- (1959). Gestalt psychology. New York: Mentor Books (The New American Library of World Literature, Inc.) Kohut, H. (1977). The restoration of self. New York: International Universities Press. Krueger, F. (1913). Consonance and dissonance. TournaI of Philo• ·sophical and Psychological Scientific Method, 10. --- (1915). Ueber Entwicklungspsychologie (On developmental psychology). Berlin: no publisher listed. References

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